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How to wipe personal data from work laptops and phones

"Not so fast, says Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Many employees regularly co-mingle their personal life with their professional devices—using their work-issued laptop or mobile phone to log in to social-media accounts, correspond with family and friends, and shop online for the holidays, for example. Corporate-owned devices, she says, are often chock-full of personal data—and removing it isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

“Deleting your personal information is a very perilous undertaking,” Pfefferkorn says. “You need to be careful that you only remove or download your personal information—you don’t want to download or delete company materials without their consent. Scrubbing your personal information, if done incorrectly, can make you seem more suspicious than you are.”"